The real danger of technology

[Please note that I have taken the core of this post and turned it into a full article, "Taylor Momsen's Secret Sex with a Green Fat Toxic Cancer Tumor," published in C-Arts Magazine and reproduced here.]

I’m afraid of technology. Not of the Terminator, smart machines, genetic engineering or even the self-replicating gray nano goo that Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, famously worried about in a 2000 Wired article, “Why the future doesn’t need us.”

I’m afraid of something much simpler: the personal computer. Specifically, way it interacts with the human brain. There has always been a tendency among children, elementary-school teachers and policemen to think in simple terms of right and wrong, in checklists and keywords and similar boxes. It’s a way of avoiding thinking.

At the end of law school, all of us who came from national schools took a ten-week Bar Bri course to learn the state law that students at state schools had been studying for three years. The one thing the Bar Bri instructors explicitly drilled into our heads was “Don’t think. Memorize and repeat keywords. Whatever you do, do NOT try to think on the test. You will only be punished for it.”

We had former exam graders explain how all essay questions needed to have certain keywords. We should underline the keywords. If we used a synonym, the grader would miss the keyword and we would lose points. The text between the keywords didn’t really matter. Just something to fill in the space, make it look like an essay. The grading had to be objective, and the only way to do that was through keywords.

A computer could have graded the exams, the way computers are now grading many elementary school essays. In other words, we’re teaching our kids to become border patrol agents.

The reason computers scare me is that we are unable to create true artificial intelligence. And yet as we become more and more computerized, as we’ve become dependent on the computer for structuring all information in society, the tension between the way the human brain works (at its best) and the way the computer works (at all times), means that the human gives in. Combine this with governments and government-like corporations that work not on satisfying individual consumers but on large-scale statistical optimizations, and you squeeze out any real thinking and individuality, let alone creativity.

McKinsey Consulting created something called the 80-20 rule. For any business, 80% of your income comes from 20% of your customers, and 80% of your expenses come from another 20%. It’s more efficient for a company to drop that expensive 20% than to satisfy them. The problem is that the 80-20 rule also applies to the population as a whole. Eighty percent of the population don’t want to think, they want to react automatically according to rules learned in grade six, much like a computer. It’s easier.

If 80% of humanity already nonthinks like a computer, and if computers are the medium through which society communicates and organizes itself now, it becomes far more efficient to force the other 20% to conform to the rules than it would be to maintain mechanisms of social interaction that are based on the sorts of quality and nuance that computers can’t easily turn into ones and zeroes. As with the bar exam, keywords are easier than thoughts.

You see this in every field, even those that would naturally seem most resistant to quantitative thinking. In the detective genre of fiction, every chapter must be between 15 and 17 pages, and the reversal (where the detective realizes he’s been pursuing the wrong suspect) must happen in chapter 13. If you write it a different way, then you don’t understand the rules and will not be published. Even in literary fiction, you have to establish the who, what, where, when, why and genre — very nearly obeying the rules of ledes in News Style — in the first four pages. And you get locked in. I just wrote a commercial Hollywood-esque sci-fi thriller and was told to publish under a pseudonym, because it clashes with my literary writing. We’re all turning into boxes.

Boxes, checklists, and keywords. Computers are making us rigid. That is the true danger of technology — because humans are far more adaptable, the computers will not adapt to us. We are adapting to them. For the worse.

Perhaps the easiest example is Google. Invented to help us retrieve information, it has completely changed the way we think about information, the way we present it and structure it. Just ask any marketing agency that has moved to more “scientific” approaches. Or read about the toxic shower curtain (from Need Press? Repeat: ‘Green,’ ‘Sex,’ ‘Cancer,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Fat’, by Joanne Kaufman):

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

Those who make their living composing news releases say there is an art to this easily dismissed craft. Strategic word selection can catapult an announcement about a study, a product or a “breakthrough” onto the evening news instead of to its usual destination — the spam folder or circular file.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”

David Seaman, a P.R. stunt planner and the author of a book to be published in October, “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” is a proponent of “safe,” “easy” “secret,” “trick” and “breaking” because they suggest that something is new and fresh, he said.

Anyone who read or heard the Toxic Shower Curtain Story can probably relax: the unsettling findings about possible respiratory, liver and reproductive damage were dismissed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Our staff scientist found many problems with the testing methodology, which called into question the credibility of the science,” said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the commission.

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice stands by its study and says that it was trying to issue an earnest public warning about an environmental hazard. “It’s so important to let people know all the evidence out there when making decisions about which products to bring into their homes,” said Dianna S. Wentz, a spokeswoman for the group.

The center was founded by Lois Gibbs, who in the ’70s fought successfully against the toxic waste dump at Love Canal.

But if the organization’s testing methodology drew skepticism, its P.R. methodology was spot on.

“Anytime you have ‘toxic’ next to an item everyone has in their house and has always been assumed to be the last thing that would harm them, you can be sure it will get picked up on the news, and the Web will spread it like wildfire,” said Allen P. Adamson, managing director of Landor, a corporate branding firm, and the author of “BrandSimple.”

The words that attract media attention change with the times. “Anything that speaks to long-term health risks is good these days, because there is a belief that there’s a lot of stuff out there harming us, from the cellphone on down,” Mr. Adamson said.

David B. Armon, the president of PR Newswire, a distribution service for public relations professionals, likens writing a news release to writing a headline for the front page of a newspaper: every word has to do heavy lifting.

“It’s a lot more scientific than it used to be,” Mr. Armon said, “because you’re not just trying to get media pickup, but to get search engine attention.”

To aid in this endeavor, PR Newswire offers its members a so-called keyword density tool. “It lets you know the words someone would have to type into a search engine for your particular press release to be found, and helps put your release at the top of the search engine,” Mr. Armon said.

“Green” and “environment” are huge right now, he said, as is “foreclosure.” “We’ve done 412 press releases that incorporate that word so far in ’08, up from 261 last year.” For the record, Mr. Armon added, the use of the word “toxic” in news releases is up 5 percent.

The words that may help get a news release picked up vary from region to region. Brenda Baumgartner, the news director and anchor at KPVI, the NBC affiliate in Pocatello, Idaho, for example, looks for words like “fishing,” “hunting,” “Mormon” and “polygamy,” she said, “because they fit the culture we live around.” KPVI also went with the toxic curtain story. “Everybody takes showers,” Ms. Baumgartner said, by way of explanation.

Words that help elevate a news release also vary from industry to industry. For instance, Tom Gable, the head of a San Diego public relations firm, said a news release about video games could benefit from a phrase like “faster graphics.” When talking about technology, he said, it would be “ ‘cost breakthrough,’ like the $200 computer.”

In the entertainment industry, on the other hand, the most basic of nouns will do — baby, breakup, marriage, divorce — according to Cindi Berger, co-chief executive of the public relations firm PMK/HBH. “Now attach names like Madonna or Jessica Simpson,” Ms. Berger said, “and of course the assignment editor is going to pay attention.”

Perhaps because many people in public relations are former journalists, they know what grates on the Fourth Estate. Mr. Gable, who was once the business editor of The San Diego Union, has compiled a list of words that will do a news release no good whatsoever, like “solutions,” “leading edge,” “cutting edge,” “state of the art,” “mission critical,” and “turnkey.”

Mr. Gable said that his company once did a weeklong survey of the releases that came out of PR Newswire and Business Wire, a commercial news distribution service, “and most of the releases identified their company as ‘a leader’ and described their research as ‘cutting edge.’”

“They were empty, unsubstantiated and had no news value,” he said.

Ken Sunshine, the head of a P.R. firm in Manhattan, said he thought the media had an institutional bias against “hype-y terms” like “world renowned” and “once in a lifetime,” which he studiously avoids putting in his news releases. “But ‘unique’ is fine,” he said, “if something really is unique.”

I wonder if I could write a novel using that keyword density tool. While I’m at it, I should probably get a computer to pick that pseudonym for me. Something like “Dick Sharpe” or “Sylvester Strong.”

But I’m probably behind the curve here. Sometimes it seems like most Hollywood screenplays, and a majority of contemporary thrillers, are already written by tools.

8 comments to The real danger of technology

What are your thoughts towards technology becoming it’s own entity and perhaps developing within itself to further its existence?? I mean, it is driven by human creativity. We continuously are seeking to make technology faster, more powerful, and more innovative. What is this need? The cell phone is already really really really good. But not good enough. What is this driving force behind technologies evolution? Capitalism? The ego? I don’t know. But there is no doubt that it is evolving at an exponential rate. This could get scary. So in conculsion, I agree.

Driving force? I think that’s the scary part, there isn’t a unified driving force. It’s not like the Manhattan project or similar nuke-building projects that required a goal, massive investment, etc. You can stop a Manhattan project simply by pulling the plug. But with general technological evolution, you can’t stop it. There are a million people out there working to create a better browser for your cell phone. If you stop one or two it won’t make any difference. Einstein said fifty years ago that our technological development had outrun our emotional maturity as a species. And fifty years ago there were tight checks-and-balances constraining the people who made those developmental decisions — though not always tight enough, as recently revealed evidence of the US attempt to nuke the Van Allen belt (with Van Allen himself helping out the military) to see whether they could destroy it shows. That decision presumably had dozens of people in the chain of command who could have said, “Hey, we just discovered these magnetic belts are protecting the Earth from solar radiation, maybe destroying them isn’t the smartest thing to do.” But instead they reasoned, “If we don’t do it the Russians will,” and so they did it. And that was only with two players.

Now we have millions of players making micro decisions, none of which alone is as drastic as stripping the Earth of the Van Allen belts. Each one is simply making a micro-improvement in a browser, or a medical nanobot, or whatever. And together they raise the baseline level of technology in an irreversible way. Might as well call it Progress.

Seen from the outside, yeah, it looks like a virus-like self-replicating meme, followed possibly by virus-like self-replicating nanobots (gray goo theory), but there’s no central brain. This isn’t the type of fear of technology that I was writing about, but I do often wonder whether our technological development isn’t Nature’s way of protecting herself. We’ve clearly become cancerous to the planet — just fly over LA on a clear day and look at the sprawl — and we’ve also become overly specialized in one direction (our brains). There’s a parallel to the dinosaurs, whose evolutionary competition caused them to get bigger and more ecologically specialized until they became unstable. Add a trigger like a weather change and they go extinct because they’ve lost the ability to adapt.

Whether you believe in the meteor impact theory or not, the dinosaurs were ready to die out, with their strength becoming their own undoing. As a general principle I think people’s strengths and weaknesses are usually the exactly same attribute (e.g., in jiu-jitsu my strength gives me some advantages but it also makes me slower to learn technique as a consequence, and the muscle mass burns ATP faster than I can replenish it, which leads to cardio problems — one attribute translates into both a strength and a weakness). And I think the same was true of the dinosaurs (size) and of us (brains/technology). Our problem won’t be lack of adaptability but the fact that we’ve taken away ecological diversity (in a socio-cultural sense). The planet is now one cultural petri dish, and if one of those millions of people screw up their experiment, the whole dish will go. Meanwhile we’re creating hyper-specialized societies that weaken our mammalian adaptability in preference of an insect-like organization. (E.g., nobody on the first two World Trade Centre planes fought the terrorists because it wasn’t their job, they thought the experts would take care of it, etc.)

Still, as a species we’re incredibly adaptable, so it will take a major screw up to kill the petri dish. But with so many people working at it, it seems kind of inevitable, sooner or later.

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